One of Borges’s hard men in old B.A. a teamster, knife fighter said ' Only a fairy would think of a woman for five minutes straight’. Not so the singers of country songs where lives frozen in time, in regret, in unwavering fidelity to a vow, an emotion forever fixed in the amber of memory. Yeah, George Jones, step right up. He specialises in this. One thinks of ' I’ll get over you when the grass grows over me’, ‘She thinks I still care’, ‘He stopped loving her today’, ‘A picture of me without you’. They are moving because no man of average experience has not encountered a faithless woman who abused your emotional hospitality. You invited them in and they dined on the chitterlings of your heart.
Yes that’s true, nevertheless consider that there is a vein of passive aggressive punishment in this weaponized fidelity.
- My life is a wreck beached on the shore, ribs striated by the cold wind. Remember this as you go on your merry marauding way. I am out there, a reproach, the bottom line of your life. Come to my funeral.
How does that make you feel? The Tibetan Buddhists have this theory about the harnessing of negative emotion as energy to overcome illusion. They call it the use of skilful means, upaya. Resentment against your deluded state of mind, anger at the endless round of transmigration, boredom with same and so forth. What use might passive aggression be? So many saints have reported feeling no mystical highs, no transports. Their faith keeps them sticking to the practice, a trudge uphill all the way. There is a noble adhesion to a vow without a pay off.
Come to my funeral God.
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